All Quiet on the Sundress Front, Part Deux
...It all sounds ridiculous written down, but I would not be surprised if many people went through a similar dreamy conflation of outer polish and inner peace when they think about their clothing. Fashion magazines encourage people to think that way, I believe. In magazines, consumption, style, and good grooming are the emblems of lifestyle, and lifestyle is the emblem of happiness. Right? I used to read Vogue when I was a teenager and fantasize about living a charmed life, which meant a life of beauty, which meant a life of outward beauty, such as I was able to read about in the pages of Vogue. I liked the stories about artistic menageries, Andy Warhol’s Factory and Peggy Guggenheim & Jackson Pollock, Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe, probably because it was slightly easier to imagine myself finding a place in a world such as that than in some of the other kinds of high-society/old-money scenes that made Vogue’s pages.
Anyway…magazines. I don’t know what to say about them. Are magazines bad? You can say that they are engines of lust, fodder for the neurotic obsession with one’s own imperfections, or rather the pointless, inward-looking quest to become perfect. Magazines feed the flames of narcissism, and also of self-hate, because one never compares favorably enough, never has enough money, class, prestige or brains. Magazines are a one-two punch: the whole point of a magazine is to deify people who are not, and never will be YOU, and that’s why you love them, and that’s why they hurt, but it’s the kind of hurt that always sends you rushing back for more. Reading a fashion magazine is like picking at the scab of one’s own self-loathing. Pick. Pick. Pressing the bruise of one’s imperfection. That thing will heal if you’d just leave it alone, y’know…yeah, but there’s something about feeling the soreness, the burn. Who knows what it is. It’s irresistible.
Certainly, magazine values aren’t the values I was brought up to, but I became fascinated with magazines. Maybe it was a mode of rebellion. I dreamed of glamour. To read a magazine and fantasize about the life I wanted to have was safe. Safer than actually trying anything, as if there were anything I could have tried, aside from retreating into my own imagination, away from the indignities of normal teenage life. And it was easier back then, because I was so young, and there was always the fall-back of “someday.” Someday, when I’m famous. Someday, when I’m perfectly dressed. Someday, when I dance on tables in satin shoes, and stun everybody with my razor wit…
Times are different now, of course. I’m 27 and it’s harder to imagine a someday shimmering off in the distance, a day when nothing will be as I have known it before. There’s too much ‘before,’ now; the more years of life I rack up, the less a radical change in the tone of everything seems likely.
So I’m thinking about the coat, the boots, the colorful scarf and the shrunken blazer and the jeans with this year’s silhouette, not last year’s. And I imagine that I’ll feel better with these things, but not that they’ll change everything. And basically I’m OK with letting go of the notion that some day everything will change. Basically OK. Some days, letting it go feels like capitulation. Other days it feels like growing up. I am still thinking about whom I’d like to be, but I’d like to imagine that my thoughts have become a little more realistic. I’m 27 and there is no ‘someday!,’ I tell myself. I try to keep straight the obscure line between having goals and imagining the best, on one hand, and longing for a kind of glossy perfection that isn’t even human, on the other.
(To be continued, yet again...)
Anyway…magazines. I don’t know what to say about them. Are magazines bad? You can say that they are engines of lust, fodder for the neurotic obsession with one’s own imperfections, or rather the pointless, inward-looking quest to become perfect. Magazines feed the flames of narcissism, and also of self-hate, because one never compares favorably enough, never has enough money, class, prestige or brains. Magazines are a one-two punch: the whole point of a magazine is to deify people who are not, and never will be YOU, and that’s why you love them, and that’s why they hurt, but it’s the kind of hurt that always sends you rushing back for more. Reading a fashion magazine is like picking at the scab of one’s own self-loathing. Pick. Pick. Pressing the bruise of one’s imperfection. That thing will heal if you’d just leave it alone, y’know…yeah, but there’s something about feeling the soreness, the burn. Who knows what it is. It’s irresistible.
Certainly, magazine values aren’t the values I was brought up to, but I became fascinated with magazines. Maybe it was a mode of rebellion. I dreamed of glamour. To read a magazine and fantasize about the life I wanted to have was safe. Safer than actually trying anything, as if there were anything I could have tried, aside from retreating into my own imagination, away from the indignities of normal teenage life. And it was easier back then, because I was so young, and there was always the fall-back of “someday.” Someday, when I’m famous. Someday, when I’m perfectly dressed. Someday, when I dance on tables in satin shoes, and stun everybody with my razor wit…
Times are different now, of course. I’m 27 and it’s harder to imagine a someday shimmering off in the distance, a day when nothing will be as I have known it before. There’s too much ‘before,’ now; the more years of life I rack up, the less a radical change in the tone of everything seems likely.
So I’m thinking about the coat, the boots, the colorful scarf and the shrunken blazer and the jeans with this year’s silhouette, not last year’s. And I imagine that I’ll feel better with these things, but not that they’ll change everything. And basically I’m OK with letting go of the notion that some day everything will change. Basically OK. Some days, letting it go feels like capitulation. Other days it feels like growing up. I am still thinking about whom I’d like to be, but I’d like to imagine that my thoughts have become a little more realistic. I’m 27 and there is no ‘someday!,’ I tell myself. I try to keep straight the obscure line between having goals and imagining the best, on one hand, and longing for a kind of glossy perfection that isn’t even human, on the other.
(To be continued, yet again...)
posted by katherine | 1:24 AM
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